Comment by rad_gruchalski
6 years ago
How can you say that localization is a difficult problem that no one has solved yet. i18n is the case for as long as I’ve been writing software, and probably longer. So minimum 20 years.
I do agree that it’s not a walk in the park because it takes loads of resources to provide actual translations and one has to make i18n a feature in the code. But... come on. phpMyAdmin was doing this in 2004.
Even in the 1980ies Microsoft employed linguists for translating terms like "scroll bar" into different languages.
However finding the right translation level in technical context is hard. For which concepts should one translate the name and which terms should one borrow the English term? The French translate "computer" as "ordinateur", the German "Rechner"/"Rechenmaschine" however is outdated.
Now what about a git repository clone and commit? How much translation will destroy understanding?
You're unfortunately still stuck in thinking you can just take a string and make it another string and boom you have i18n.
Unfortunately that's misunderstanding that fundamentally language relies on way more context than just strings to get the same message across.
You can't just simply translate and have a good UX for other languages.